With recent advances in digital technology, a number of exciting and innovative approaches to writing lives have emerged, from graphic memoirs to blogs and other visual-verbal-virtual texts. This edited collection is a timely study of new approaches to writing lives, including literary docu-memoir, autobiographical cartography, social media life writing and autobiographical writing for children. Combining literary theory with insightful critical approaches, each essay offers a serious study of innovative forms of life writing, with a view to reflecting on best practice and offering the reader practical guidance on methods and techniques. Offering a range of practical exercises and an insight into cutting-edge literary methodologies, this is an inspiring and thought-provoking companion for students of literature and creative writing studying courses on life writing, memoir or creative non-fiction.

With recent advances in digital technology, a number of exciting and innovative approaches to writing lives have emerged, from graphic memoirs to blogs and other visual-verbal-virtual texts. This edited collection is a timely study of new approaches to writing lives, including literary docu-memoir, autobiographical cartography, social media life writing and autobiographical writing for children. Combining literary theory with insightful critical approaches, each essay offers a serious study of innovative forms of life writing, with a view to reflecting on best practice and offering the reader practical guidance on methods and techniques. Offering a range of practical exercises and an insight into cutting-edge literary methodologies, this is an inspiring and thought-provoking companion for students of literature and creative writing studying courses on life writing, memoir or creative non-fiction.

This volume examines innovative intersections of life-writing and experimental fiction in the 20th and 21st centuries, bringing together scholars and practicing biographers from several disciplines (Modern Languages, English and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing). It covers a broad range of biographical, autobiographical, and hybrid practices in a variety of national literatures, among them many recent works: texts that test the ground between fact and fiction, that are marked by impressionist, self-reflexive and intermedial methods, by their recourse to myth, folklore, poetry, or drama as they tell a historical character’s story. Between them, the essays shed light on the broad range of auto/biographical experimentation in modern Europe and will appeal to readers with an interest in the history and politics of form in life-writing: in the ways in which departures from traditional generic paradigms are intricately linked with specific views of subjectivity, with questions of personal, communal, and national identity. The Introduction of this book is open access under a CC BY 4.0 license via link.springer.com.

This book is a comprehensive study of some ways of treating the subject that demonstrate new and unusual perspectives, and provides a different approach to the popularly-held views of mothers-in-law; and that further address these works as popular culture; and as texts in their own right from within the framework of literary theory; and as works that demonstrate the ability to reach and connect with, and satisfy, both the general reader, the student, and the scholar, from all levels and walks of life.

Offshoot includes essays in life writing methodologies and approaches, as well as a series of creative work-poetry and prose-that engages with current life writing. This collection highlights the development and influence of the genre in the twenty-first century. Starting from the premise that life writing is a significant component of both contemporary artistic practice and scholarship, Offshoot provides a necessary re-evaluation of the mode, its contemporary sub-generic incarnations, as well as methodological and practical approaches. The book presents research on a wide range of approaches, including both traditional areas-such as literature and creative writing-and areas that have not previously been associated with life writing scholarship. With its multifaceted readings, Offshoot signals a shift in life writing research tending towards an expansive, hybrid, experimental, and rhizomic approach. [Subject: Life Writing, Education, Literature]

A critical history of experimental writing theory, its aesthetic foundations, and their application to current multimodal writing. Patricia Sullivan sheds new light on both the positive and negative aspects of experimental writing and its attempts to redefine the writing disciplines. She further articulates the ways that multimedia is and isn't changing composition pedagogies, and provides insights into resolving these tensions.

In this "refreshingly relatable" (Outside) memoir, perfect for the self-isolating family, Slate editor Dan Kois sets out with his family on a journey around the world to change their lives together. What happens when one frustrated dad turns his kids' lives upside down in search of a new way to be a family? Dan Kois and his wife always did their best for their kids. Busy professionals living in the D.C. suburbs, they scheduled their children's time wisely, and when they weren't arguing over screen time, the Kois family-Dan, his wife Alia, and their two pre-teen daughters-could each be found searching for their own happiness. But aren't families supposed to achieve happiness together? In this eye-opening, heartwarming, and very funny family memoir, the fractious, loving Kois' go in search of other places on the map that might offer them the chance to live away from home-but closer together. Over a year the family lands in New Zealand, the Netherlands, Costa Rica, and small-town Kansas. The goal? To get out of their rut of busyness and distractedness and to see how other families live outside the East Coast parenting bubble. HOW TO BE A FAMILY brings readers along as the Kois girls-witty, solitary, extremely online Lyra and goofy, sensitive, social butterfly Harper-like through the Kiwi bush, ride bikes to a Dutch school in the pouring rain, battle iguanas in their Costa Rican kitchen, and learn to love a town where everyone knows your name. Meanwhile, Dan interviews neighbors, public officials, and scholars to learn why each of these places work the way they do. Will this trip change the Kois family's lives? Or do families take their problems and conflicts with them wherever we go? A journalistic memoir filled with heart, empathy, and lots of whining, HOW TO BE A FAMILY will make readers dream about the amazing adventures their own families might take.